rustypouch:It's too bad there's no way to almost eliminate the risk of developing type II diabetes...

Diabeetus and to an only slightly lesser extent heart disease: the only two diseases that you can most likely avoid ever getting by simply taking a brisk half hour walk a day and not eating like a bear in autumn.

Well, if you have the money to buy real food that is. That's the real problem. If you're poor and you rely on SNAP to avoid starving, you make one trip a month to the grocery store to spend it all (go every week? every few days? Ain't got time for that between two minimum wage jobs, or money for the gas!). What do you buy if it's got to keep in the freezer for a month? Super-processed frozen stuff, which is made from real food in a process that can be roughly summarized as "systematically removing all nutritive value and replacing it with grease, salt and MSG." http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growin g -up-poor/ Then even if you escape the poverty trap and can afford to eat right (or at least acceptably)... you've been conditioned to think that food is supposed to taste like overprocessed crap.

It's not a coincidence that being poor is a #1 risk factor for being seriously overweight. Or if you're not poor but your parents feed you an awful diet, because their parents fed them an awful diet, because... If I see some grade school kid who's a few years away from outweighing me, "sigh, the poor dear probably never had a chance..."

Most of the time, if the solution really is that obvious, there's a reason everyone doesn't do it. The other problem is the absurd body ideals that are foisted on us. The media constantly pushes on all of us that attractive women are waif-thin, and attractive men spend a minimum of 15 hours a week lifting weights. Combine that with lying scammers being allowed to push bullshiat fitness machines that will supposedly make you look like an underwear model "in just minutes a day" and it's no wonder that 90% of the people in the gym during the first week of January are gone by February (Or maybe it's like one of my friends put it: "I swear I'm never going to stop exercising, because I never want to be as sore as when I started exercising again.")

/Didn't really get into shape until he started climbing//Climb, and remember to do some shoulder/chest/triceps to stay balanced

Free Radical:The healthcare costs to keep these people alive will be astronomical.Yet these people can all vote and do.So, everyone is screwed.

The end.

As someone who has a very good chance of developing diabetes (type II and gestational run rampant in my family), based on what I've seen, I have to agree with this.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who do a great job with managing their conditions. I'll hopefully be one of them.

But then I look at my brother, who was morbidly obese nearly his entire life and a year and a half after the diagnosis still hasn't done anything to fix that, I can already see a long series of treatments in his future. We're of the white-trash stripe, so he's spent a good deal of his life buried in his vices, and in his late 30's, feels no compunction towards fixing that, even slowly.

I can see a lot of people on the horizon who developed bad habits early in life and have neither the motivation nor the healthy support system to change things.

Because a lot of people believe they don't have to change their lifestyle, and that the medicine will take care of things for them. Doctors should be telling them that, fark yes, your lifemust change. Period. No exceptions, no excuses. If you want to live more comfortably now and in the future, you can't be who you used to be. You can't eat like you'd like to, or at least how you're doing it. You really need to exercise -walk, for fark's sake - a little bit more. Take your medicines, and don't believe anyone who says they can cure you with supplements, but don't believe for a second that the medicines fix everything. There's some stuff that's on you. For your family, or for whatever, but deal with it.

/poorly-managed diabetes is a nightmare//have seen way too much diabetes in my lifetime///going to find a corner and cry now

Maybe we can start seeing "light", "diet", or "low-calorie" foods that are sugar free instead of fat free and doubled down on the sugar. Until my local grocery started selling Carbmaster, all of the "light" yogurt was full of corn syrup and/or sugar. Similar for ice cream.